A Boat Load of Home Folk Read Free Page B

frail old man secure in the knowledge that his soul was destined for eternal bliss and he wanted to rattle the calm. “Ah,” he heard himself saying, or imagined that he could hear, “you’re wrong there. One does. I hate your stinking pedantic ‘one’, but one does. One is starved for even death in the flesh trapped here between the heat and the wet.” But he only said, “Do you wish me to go out on supply next month? You know Father Dooley is leaving Santo for a while. I think a couple of months. His mother is ill.”
    Deladier was groomed for every sophistry of response. He dropped his eyes. “I think we should be having lunch—” and he clapped his chalky hands for the house boy who was Jimmy Terope’s older brother. “I don’t know,” he said vaguely. “We must talk about it later.” He procrastinated for God.
    John Terope was a slender boy of sixteen, lean, over-tender, orphaned, aware. He knew too much of the needs of older people, and would with pressure grant these. Deliberately and presciently he stared at his bare feet, moved them over the linoleum, and shuttered his dark eyes.
    â€œGood morning, John,” Father Lake said, smiling.
    John Terope glanced obliquely at the father.
    â€œGuddee, father,” he said shyly. It was not really shyly.
    â€œYes,” said the bishop. “Well, John is a splendid fellow. Really a splendid fellow. We’ll have him an altar boy before long.
Dominus vobiscum,
John, eh, eh?”
    â€œEt cum spiritu tuo,”
replied John blurredly but pleased.
    â€œYou see?” said the bishop, presenting his protégé as if he were some musical genius. “A splendid fellow. I think we’ll need lunch in half an hour. Is Sister in the kitchen?”
    â€œYes, your grace.”
    Father Lake’s somewhat watered down blue eyes met those of the boy with a transient rapport as he scuffled a little, out of formal diffidence and excited apprehension. What elaborate glister on the skin, pondered the priest. What charity of flesh, of mouth. The long summers were relaxed, the flaccid days melted into shapes of this or that, crosses dropped and did not save, being in this tropic margin foreign as snow, being unreal posed against outrageous native totem or tropic leaf or long canoe.
    In the beginning, Lake pondered, two years ago, there definitely was the Word and the Word was Light. But its brilliance was outshone by heat, by everlasting summer, by sea dazzle, by sweat, by the apathy of the congregation belting out a post-offertory hymn to the tune of Auld Lang Syne, by his own growingdespair. He had long ago stopped saying his Office with care and jabbered it quickly in the evening in the interval between the first brandy and the next four. He sometimes could not utter the words of consecration, and sometimes would not. That was the end of the line, they had all told him at the seminary. The sinning priest refrained as a last resort to avoid the final sacrilege of consecrating while in a state of mortal sin. That, he had been told, was the slagged junction, the darkened workshop and the final pull into shadow.
    Lunch was a failure. There was cold fish salad and spongy bread. The bishop, who was not a man of fleshly taste, appeared not to notice. Lake between bites watched John Terope paddle backwards and forwards to the kitchen.
    â€œI don’t know,” Deladier said, abstractedly trying to fork a piece of melon onto his plate. A fish flake hung from his chin. His dignity was dropping away. “I don’t see how we can spare you.”
    â€œI need the change,” Lake said. “That’s really my trouble. I need it very badly.”
    â€œHere is your test, my son,” said the bishop with a shade of sanctimoniousness. “Offer it up. We must all expose ourselves to aridity of some kind.”
    â€œI am afraid,” Lake said with an effort.
    He thought that the bishop